The top 3 applications for Wearable technology and Augmented Reality in the Automotive Industry are discussed, in a recent guest article by Randy Nunez of The Ford Motor Company, that appeared on a blog post from BrainXchange (AREA Member).

Nunez outlines what he believes are the top three use cases for Wearable technology and Augmented Reality in Automotive. The top three are:

• Guided Instructions – Adding digital or virtual content while in the real world to provide step-by-step instructions for procedures or workflows is a key use case
• Remote Expert – Using smart eyewear in conjunction with video/audio collaboration software can connect local users with remote experts to provide real-time guidance
• Design Visualization – Visual 3D representation of a vehicle design can include physical prototypes made of clay or wood.  This can be expensive and time-consuming to create and modify.

Randy will be speaking on a panel about applications for Smart Glasses and other head work devices on Thursday 11 May at the Spring Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit 2017 in San Diego, CA.

If you are interested in reading the full article click here.

Press release dated May 9 2017: ABI Research ranks AREA Member PTC’s Vuforia platform as the leader among 19 Augmented Reality platform competitors, with Re’Flekt and Ubimax securing first and second runners-up positions. The initial sections of the press release are published below:

Recently acquired by PTC, Vuforia’s expansive platform offering and demanding market share now combines augmented reality (AR), IoT, and enterprise expertise. This positions Vuforia as the leader in AR platforms, especially when considering the dominant enterprise focus in the market.

“Vuforia’s story has several facets that are responsible for its favorable position: ample market experience, a complete portfolio, and a competitive enterprise supplement through PTC,” says Eric Abbruzzese, Senior Analyst at ABI Research. “The importance of a strong enterprise play cannot be understated. While the consumer market may be the key to eventual AR ubiquity, the enterprise market is this industry’s foundation.”

ABI Research’s competitive assessment broke competitors into three groups to better reflect the nature of the platforms: software development kit (SDK)-focused, application-focused, and usage-focused. While Vuforia, Re’Flekt, and Ubimax take the top three spots among all companies, each group has its own, distinct winners.

Vuforia, Wikitude, and ARToolKit are top suppliers in the SDK-focused group mainly due to strong machine vision and cloud device support. Aurasma (by HP), Augment, and Blippar score highest in the application-focused group thanks to strong customer footprint, fair pricing, and good developer accessibility. Re’Flekt, Ubimax, and Upskill Skylight are the main three in the usage-focused group due to their strong device support, IoT synergy, and smart glasses support.

A press release from Upskill dated May 9, 2017 reveals that AREA Member, Upskill (formerly APX Labs), a leader in enterprise software for Augmented Reality (AR) devices, announced the acquisition of Austin, TX-based Pristine, the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of AR collaboration and video streaming software. The press release can be read here

And is summarised below:
Pristine’s remote assistance and knowledge capture solutions will complement Upskill’s existing Skylight industrial AR platform to offer the most comprehensive product offering in the industry, making it easier for customers to meet their operational needs and IT requirements.

“Augmented reality is driving incredible productivity results across functional areas in industrial enterprises. Our customers are seeing an average of 32 percent performance improvement from their very first use of Skylight,” said Brian Ballard, co-founder and CEO, Upskill. “There aren’t very many new technologies that can deliver this kind of ‘out of the box’ value creation, which is why adoption of AR technology is accelerating at an incredible pace. This underscores the importance for Upskill to leverage new opportunities that will help us scale and innovate faster than anyone else in the space. The acquisition of Pristine will allow us to do just that.”

Pristine is best known for its flagship product, EyeSight, which provides best-in-class “see what I see” video streaming capabilities for remote experts. Customer deployments have proven EyeSight to help workers complete inspection, compliance and repair processes at a fraction of the cost and time normally required. Through the acquisition, Upskill will now offer Pristine’s portfolio of field-worker collaboration solutions including EyeSight. These applications are typically deployed on smart glasses, but are also available across Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad and Android devices. With Pristine solutions in its repertoire, Upskill will be able to add breadth and domain expertise to its product offering and more choices for customers seeking to implement AR across manufacturing, logistics and field service applications.

Along with the added technology capabilities and product solutions, Pristine also brings to Upskill a talented engineering and product team with deep industry experience in scaling deployment of enterprise wearables across an impressive client base,

Look out for our upcoming blog where The AREA speaks to Jay Kim of Upskill.

Vuzix Corporations will work with Accenture and Airbus on a new initiative to reduce time taken to assemble aircraft cabin seats. The glasses have contextual marking instructions which they use to display all the information needed by an operator to quickly and accurately mark the floor.

The collaboration between Airbus, Accenture and Vuzix smart glasses is part of a larger initiative towards industrialized wearable technology in major aircraft manufacturing companies.

The eye technology which is implemented by Accenture increases the level of interaction by offering access to important features like data retrieval from the cloud, barcode scanning, Augmented Reality and voice commands. By using this technology, Airbus is able to mark seat locations to the last millimeter with a lot of accuracy and high quality.

According to Airbus, the technology produced impressive results.  The process of making cabin seats improved by 500%. The company also says the technology reduced the rate of error to zero and generally accelerated the level of operations.

In addition, the technology reduced the requirements for training as the smart glasses relay the required data hence wiping out the need for use of manual methods.

Announced this week, AREA member RealWear, makers of the HMT-1 which is the first voice-driven, hands free, head-mounted tablet, will moderate the Wearables, Big Data and the Internet of Things panel this year at the Spring 2017 EWTS event.

The Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit is the leading event, focused on the use of Wearable technology for industrial enterprise applications. The panel will include companies such as CDM Smith, Boeing, GE and many more with the event taking place in San Diego, CA, May 10-12.

Andy Lowery, CEO of RealWear who will be the moderator has said “Innovations in wearable technology are currently transforming how work gets done across all industries. I look forward to leading the discussion on the emergence of wearable technology for the enterprise, the benefits it is delivering and the challenges that remain as wearables continue to become valuable assets for the 21^st-century workforce.”

Panellists will include Scott Aldridge from CDM, Peter Chai from Brigham and Women’s hospital, Thomas Dawidczyk from Lux Research, Brain Laughlin from Boeing and Sam Murley from GE.

Corporation Pop, a digital agency company, has received £50,000 of funding in order to develop a hospital app which uses Augmented Reality and artificial intelligence to help young patients in the UK National Health Service, according to an article by Business Cloud.

An avatar on the Patient’s Virtual Guide keeps children company and gives them information as they pass through the system, reducing stress and anxiety about their treatment and surroundings.

Dom Raban, Corporation Pop MD has said, “This is a very personal project for me. In 2011 my then 13-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer…Thankfully my daughter will soon be celebrating five years cancer free, but her experience left me wanting to use my professional capability to respond to the problem and find a technology solution that could meet the information needs of young people about to embark on an often traumatic and stressful hospital journey. With this fantastic support from Nominet Trust we can now begin the next crucial stage of development.”

According to the article, Corporation Pop has worked on the project for almost two years and last year received funding from NHS technology network TITCH.

Peter-Marc Fortune, associate clinical head at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital and Corporation Pop’s clinical consultant, said: “I have yet to show the pilot app to anyone – of any age – who has not positively engaged with it. This technology has the potential to greatly improve the healthcare experience for people of all ages across the NHS.”

Augumenta, a company supplying Augmented Reality applications and development tools to organizations that use Smartglasses, are developing AR applications with the introduction of Augumenta Studio.

This is a cloud-based tool which allows developers to quickly design AR applications for smartglass-equipped workers using pre-built templates, libraries of control elements such as meters and gauges, and Augumenta’s virtual surface tools and gesture-control software.

Augumenta Studio supports the application design for the Augumenta SmartPanel application template. It allows workers with Smartglasses can see and operate virtual control panels for machines that appear as a blank surface to others. It’s used to set-up the virtual control panel, providing highly configurable and flexible human-machine interaction for industrial, commercial and IoT applications.

Tero Aaltonen, Co-Founder and CEO of Augumenta says, “Augmented Reality provides manufacturing organizations with real-time access to critical factory data and the ability to control machines and production lines without accessing a physical control station, resulting in shorter problem-solving times and greater shop floor efficiency.”

The Augumenta SmartPanel and SmartAlert application templates give enterprise customers and developers an unprecedented level of flexibility paired with privacy and security. Displays are completely configurable and only an authorized smartglass user is able to view data and controls. Displays also can contain different information and controls based on the user’s role. This is useful not just in industrial applications but also in operating medical monitoring and diagnostic systems.

An article released this week by VR Room discusses the companies with heavy investment in Augmented and Virtual Reality. Facebook gets a mention, as does Venture capital firm Rothenberg Ventures who it is claimed has made 32 investments in the industry.

Worldwide revenues for the Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality market are projected to approach $14 billion in 2017, according to research by the IDC. But that’s forecast to explode to $143 billion by 2020.  Increased investment is leading to hiring sprees for AR/VR jobs.

The article provides graphs to show which companies have invested the most in AR/VR investments and acquisitions.  Additionally, there is a graph showing the most AR/VR job listings on LinkedIn such as Microsoft and INTEL.

This article with the graphs can be seen and read in full here.

An article on Enterprise Innovation Net speaks of 5 technologies that are transforming and disrupting the future of production. Included in the report are Wearables and Augmented Reality, the Internet of Things, Advanced Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and 3D Printing. The full report can be read here, however, the wearables and Augmented Reality section connected with future production will be of most interest to our readers and is reproduced below:

Wearables and Augmented Reality (AR)

Technology for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) is disrupting the market and the article says it could become the next computing platform, following personal computers and smartphones. These technologies fundamentally shift the way that information is relayed to the user, offering immediate access to critical data.

Wearables, AR and VR present valuable use cases for quality inspection, work instructions, training, workflow management, operations and safety, logistics and maintenance.

Wearables can offer value across multiple dimensions in production:

• Productivity improvements through communication, data digitalization and IoT integration
• Health and fitness wearables will lead to improved health, fewer safety incidents and reduced insurance premiums.
• AR and wearables will lead to improved quality through remote verification, automatic mistake proofing and live, step-by-step instruction/documentation
• VR and wearables will lead to significant reduction in workforce training costs and increased training effectiveness.
• VR will be an integral part of design methodology and design for manufacturability, reducing time to market for new products.

Industries with a high labour cost or high cost of mistakes have the greatest potential to achieve a significant return on investment with these technologies disrupting industry.

In a recent report released this week, QY Research released a market report on the Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality App Market.  Major players included in the report are Aurasma, Blippar, Catchoom, DAQRI and Wikitude. Catchoom and DAQRI are members of The AREA.

This report has been segmented based upon applications, end-users, technology and geography.

The Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Apps research report also offer comprehensive assessment of the AR and VR Apps Market and consists of historical data, scope, significant approaches and statistical data of the global market.

Some highlights from this report include:

• A complete backdrop analysis, which includes an assessment of the parent market.
• Important changes in market dynamics
• Market segmentation up to the second or third level
• Historical, current, and projected size of the market from the standpoint of both value and volume
• Reporting and evaluation of recent industry developments
• Market shares and strategies of key players
• Emerging niche segments and regional markets

This report also contains and evaluates the range of factors of the Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Apps industry, such as definition, demands, share, analysis, supply, sales, size, specification, forecast trends, production, classification, industry policy, news and application. This report will also provide significant and reliable information on the market clearly in structed format and offers a key manufacturer of the products, applications, DROS and others.